Former Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid, who had endowed the country with a multiparty system, before being forced to resign in 1992 by the army, died Saturday at the age of 83 years. He died at a military hospital in Algiers, the Algerian official news agency APS reported. Last week he was admitted to the intensive care unit of a military hospital in Ain-Naadja in Algiers. He likely suffered from an advanced prostate cancer and renal failure.

Became president in 1979, Chadli had launched a series of political reforms that allowed multiparty legislative and municipal elections.

But after the victory of the Islamic Front (FIS), an Islamist party in parliamentary elections in 1991, the military intervened to suspend the electoral process and forced Chadli to resign in January 1992. The country was plunged into a decade of civil war that killed at least 200,000 people. Bendjedid had been under house arrest in a location hundreds of kilometers from the capital until 1999.